Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 471

The 5 most underwhelming apologies of 2013

Sorry, “I’m sorry” just doesn’t cut it.

How Facebook’s scary artificial intellegence could change game consoles

Last week Facebook made public their plans to establish an artificial intelligence lab, a new research center devoted to giving you the content you care about. The new technology, which is purely theoretical at this point, aims to analyze video and voice, delivering to your news feed the cutest kitten videos, while keeping, say, the memoirs of a deer your uncle slayed over the weekend at bay (unless, of course, you’re into that sort of thing). See, technology isn't always scary!

In an interview with Wired, the lead researcher on the project explained that while computers are good at picking out your face from a crowd using facial recognition, or even recognizing your voice, they have no way of understanding what’s actually going on or being said. 

The obvious question is “What can this research do for games?” The obvious answer is “Nobody knows!” But with technology like voice recognition and motion detection becoming standard on gaming consoles, it’s easy to imagine how this could change things. Right now, devices like the Kinect record voice and video but are relatively simple input devices for entering manual commands. If they could become complex enough to learn about you, they’d become essential, instead of devices we leave unplugged.

(img via collectortribune)

We can almost guarantee Secrets of Raetikon will be a major influence on everybody

Some creators have the uncanny knack to be trendsetters. This goes for the Austrian developer Broken Rules, whose new game Secrets of Raetikon will be available on Steam Early Access come January 7th. 

You may be familiar with these Nostradamuses from Vienna by way of And Yet It Moves, an Independent Games Festival student entry of some accolade that predicted several big trends. It was auspiciously ahead of its time with its world-spinning platforming mechanic and its paper-craft aesthetic, which we’ll endearingly refer to as “the paper bag look.” Both of these ideas were influential, as we can think of the gravity-shifts in Super Mario Galaxy, and of paper art styles in Tearaway. (And in all of these  awesome games.) 

Does this mean the next big thing will be games about sailing quetzals through a post-painterly Gauguin wilderness? If the footage of Secrets of Raetikon is anything to go on, and naturally it is, being that it's footage of the game, it’s definitely a possibility.

Top 5 Michael Brough Games of 2013*

*that didn’t make our year-end list.

The soft strum of an acoustic guitar can make even a new Walking Dead trailer soothing

Here are some of the gruesome things you won’t notice in the Walking Dead season 2 trailer because the music is so lovely: a hammer cracking open the skull of a zombie; a man and woman with holes blown in their head, holding hands, a revolver resting in the guy’s other hand; a little girl being grabbed by a man who is in turn grabbed and bitten by a zombie. If that sounds a little too graphic, don’t worry. The tender chords of an acoustic guitar smooth away the darkest imagery. Seriously, I came away with pleasant thoughts of nap-time with kittens and snuggling by the fireplace. Did it do the same for you, or am I desensitized?

And the best mods of the year are...

Modding is the most benevolent kind of narcissism. Think about it. Here is this person, just another player, who decides for whatever reason that, say, Skyrim doesn’t live up to expectations. It would be better if they had made it. So they do. Us unadventurous types are ever-thankful for their egotism, because we get an extended cut of mountain hiking and wyvern-zapping for nothing.

Now is the chance to show your appreciation to these heroes of hacking, as there are seven days remaining in which to vote for Mod Database’s top-mod-of-the-year. There are plenty of mods in the running this year. The Sith Lords in The Knights of the Old Republic were finally given the treatment that a Sith Lord should be given; Thief was HD-ified; Day Z continued to be awesome; and a nautical-minded person went through the trouble of overhauling the Pirates of the Caribbean game with a historical naval campaign. This is why we love modding.

How XCOM taught me that I don’t matter

In memory of the people on the ground.

The week in outrageous GTA pranks: jets on the freeway and bus skydiving

Grand Theft Auto V is a source of endless amusement, mostly because of all the unbelievable things you can get away with. Naturally this includes loading a city bus with a gang of roughnecks, dropping it at the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere from a helicopter, and synchronously parachuting out. Rockstar’s games don’t have much of a sense of humor, and fail miserably when they try to, but how can you not laugh at a pack of hooligans in pig masks flipping each other off in the hot tub after a successful jump.

New PBS Game/Show asks Would it Matter if Master Chief Were Gay?

It depends whether or not you mind being a little gay.

The horrific SOMA trailer promises brilliant, horrible, horrible things

The first thing you see in the newest trailer for SOMA are tentacles stretched across a foreboding catwalk under flickering lighting. The obvious point of comparison is to the horror author H.P. Lovecraft, innovator of all tendrils long and slimy. Frictional Games, who are sort of the O.G.'s of the PC horror renaissance, have more to worry about than crafting a spooky yarn by flapping visceral alien-legs all over the place. 

As they explain in this blog post, their challenge is to bait the player into the terror-inducing moments by using something we all are intimately familiar with—the language of play. “A good example is how we design puzzles. Instead of having the puzzle by itself, as a separate activity, it always springs from and is connected to some aspect of the story. . . There are always short-term narrative reasons and rewards for getting [a door] unlocked,” they write. This seems especially devious, using the logic of problem-solving to pull me into a scene that scares the shit out of me.